VCAP

A couple weeks ago I sat and passed the VCAP 6.5 Datacenter Design Exam. It was a good but tough exam. The VCAP 6.5 Design exam is a bit different from past VCAP Design Exams – there are no Visio type questions. Just multiple choice and “drag and drop” questions.

In January 2014 the VMware vSphere 5.x Datacenter Design Cookbook I wrote was published by Packt Publishing. Just before Christmas the publisher of the vSphere Design Cookbook contacted me about updating the book to vSphere 6. After a bit of planning what updates would be included I accepted. I started working on the update this past week and submitted the first draft of the updated Chapter 1 last night.

Here is a quick walk through on creating a Nested vSphere 6 VSAN Lab. The lab requires three nested ESXi 6.0 hosts each configured with three hard disks and a VCSA 6.0. This post covers creating the nested ESXi hosts and configuring a VSAN cluster.

I have been running my home lab in Workstation for a good while now and it has served me well especially throughout my VCAP-DCA study. I am starting to do a bit more testing and proof-of-concept stuff with vSphere 5 and VDI so I need a little more.

Since Auto Deploy allows for the creation fo diskless/stateless hosts there is a need to have a network service to store core dumps so that diagnostic information can be collected for support in the event your host crashes (PSOD).